This article was originally published in the Fall ’06 issue of Revisions, Sex is Good.
There is no question that religion has become a defining part of contemporary American political and civic life. The public square has become fully clothed with tattered religious rhetoric that elicits fear, frustration, joy and delight amidst our pluralistic democracy. From the office of the president and the neo-conservatives to the religious right and the religious left, religion, and in particular Christianity, is a de facto part of civil society in America. The Protestant traditions have been divided over the issue of engaging the secular. Followers of Hauerwas and other Anabaptist traditions call for a divide between the church and the state, while those descendents of the magisterial reformation have countered this isolationist attitude with a public theology of engagement and co-belligerence.
In this day, when Jerusalem and Athens seem to have collided in evangelical America, the church is in need of a public theology deeply grounded in Scripture that provides the theological resources and rationale to thoughtfully engage the public realm. However, many Christians have questioned the rationale of engaging the world around us. The Roman Catholic response to this doubt has been their appeal to lex naturalis, or natural law, to find common ground within all people. Yet, for many Protestants who uphold the doctrine of total depravity, and in particular the noetic effects of the fall, natural law does not furnish an adequate or sufficient theological foundation to build a public theology. Reformed theologians fall into this latter category, and many appeal to the notion of common grace. I want to argue, building on the works of Swiss Reformer John Calvin and Dutch Prime Minister Abraham Kuyper, that common grace grounded in the work of the Holy Spirit provides the theological rationale for Christians to work side by side with those outside the church to meaningfully engage every sector of life and society.
The Holy Spirit
Often when Christians think of the work of the Holy Spirit, they limit his activity to Christians. They don’t consider how the Spirit works his perfective purposes in all of creation, in all the cosmos. John Calvin in his Institutes writes, “We ought not to forget those most excellent benefits of the divine Spirit, which he distributes to whomever he wills for the common good of mankind… he fills, moves, and quickens all things by the power of the same Spirit, and does so according to the character that he bestowed upon each kind by the law of creation.1 Calvin understands that the work and influence of the Holy Spirit extend outside of the church to all people and creation.2 following Calvin, Abraham Kuyper also states, “the work of the holy Spirit is not confined to the elect, and does not begin with their regeneration, but it touches every creature, animate and inanimate, and begins its operations in the elect at the very moment of their origin.”3 he continues by distinguishing the Spirit’s role in creation as the perfector4 and assigns to the Holy Spirit the task of leading all creation to its final destiny and purpose, which is the glory of God. this glory is manifested in various ways: “an insect and a star, the mildew on the wall and the cedar of Lebanon, a common laborer and a man like Augustine, are all the creatures of God; yet how dissimilar they are, and how various their ways and degrees of glorifying God.”5 Before and after the fall, the manifold glory of God is manifest throughout all of creation and the task of the Holy Spirit is to complete the end of God’s glory throughout his creation. The same Spirit that indwells the hearts of Christians also works, in Christian and non-Christian alike, to bring this world in its entirety to its God-glorifying ends.
Implications of Common Grace
The work of the Holy Spirit provides a theological foundation to build our understanding of common grace—one that is anchored in the ontological holy trinity. He is the eternal Spirit who, from the very beginning of creation, brought order and life into the midst of creation’s chaos and death. When we consider his cosmic work, we have a rationale why Christians ought to engage every facet of the world in which we live. The Holy Spirit is at work in all of creation and society, working to apply his redemptive and perfective purpose.
Common grace has often been understood as being primarily negative—restraining the power of sin in the world. However, given the telos of the Spirit’s work, common grace ought to be seen as a positive, progressing, constructive power in the world. To understand common grace as the restraint of sin is to insufficiently recognize the cosmic purpose of God’s Spirit in the world. This active, positive work is done on the Christian and non-Christian alike. They both are able to share in the restorative experience of the Holy Spirit (cf. Hebrews 6:4–6). The holy Spirit is able to work in and through the Christian and non-Christian to bring about his good purposes. This principle does not violate the doctrine of total depravity as the good works are the result of the Spirit’s operating in the Christian and non-Christian. This should not lead to a romantic idealism of the future; that type of positivism does not take seriously the nature and impact of sin. The Calvinistic notion of total depravity must balance and ward off any sense of Christian perfectionism or an idealized progress of humanity. As history continues by the mercy of God, both sinful flesh and the Spirit are at work and at war with one another. As Romans 8 reveals, the Spirit will prevail, yet until that final day, evil will continue to persist in all its multiformity. Yet, the fact that the Spirit continues to be at work gives us the opportunity and rationale to work with others in and outside the church to advance God’s Kingdom in the world. This is indeed common grace.
There remains a clear antithesis between Christian and non-Christian; however, this antithesis lies in the permanence of the Spirit’s actions. In the case of the elect, his eternal presence will eradicate sin in the individual, whereas, those who are not permanently indwelled by the Spirit will have to face judgment on the basis of their own merit. When the Spirit indwells a person, that believer is a new creation, yet that new creation de facto bears much similarity to the old. Christians can do evil acts in the flesh and non-Christians can do good works through the influence of the Spirit, but the important distinction between the two is that through faith in Christ, the Christian has received the special grace of the Spirit’s eternal indwelling.6
In conclusion, the notion of common grace grounded in the work of the Holy Spirit provides a theological rationale to engage co-belligerently with every sector of the world around us. Theologian Vincent Bacote writes, “this work of the Spirit is a providential, preserving, indwelling, and life-giving interaction with the created order. It extends back to the beginning of creation but continues into the present and invites us to shape the world toward the future.”7 The confidence we have to work in common with the world for God’s glory and for humanity’s good lies not in any inherently unfallen aspect of the world or people, but rather in the ongoing, unified, cosmic work of the Holy Spirit. it is the ongoing work of the holy Spirit which guards Christians from creating an artificial divide between the sacred and the secular, and for this reason we can boldly assert with Kuyper, “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: ‘Mine!’”
- Calvin, 275. Institutes Book ii, ii, 16. [↩]
- Vincent E. Bacote, The Spirit in Public Theology (Michigan: Baker academic, 2005). Refer to 92–96 for a brief overview of common grace in Calvin. [↩]
- Abraham Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit (Tennessee: AMG Publishers, 2001), 48. [↩]
- “that in every work effected by the father, Son and holy Ghost in common, the power to bring forth proceeds from the father; the power to arrange from the Son; the power to perfect from the holy Spirit… the great teachers of the Church, after the fifth century, used to distinguish the operations of the Persons of the trinity by saying that the operation whereby all things originated proceeds from the father; that whereby they received consistency from the Son; and that whereby they were led to their destiny from the holy Spirit.” Kuyper, Holy Spirit, 20. [↩]
- Kuyper, Holy Spirit, 23. [↩]
- Cf. Romans 7:25–8:30. [↩]
- Bacote, 21. [↩]
